White paper-preliminary paper: place to try out ideas, collection of purposeful summaries, repository for sources. It’s a work in progress- whenever you find a source, you can record it in your white paper and work through its ideas. You can add things to it at any time or delete anything that you find is irrelevant as you continue to research. A white paper is not meant to be polished work, it’s meant to be a collection of thoughts that can be polished down later. A white paper is valuable because instead of having to go back to the original sources to refresh your memory, you can just go back to your own words that you wrote in your purposeful summary.

Writing about sources as we read them is an important part in thinking about them. Writing or talking about the ideas in our sources forces us to share thoughts with other people,  which makes us really have to think. This is why the “think about sources” in the writing process is unnecessary. We can just skip to the “write about sources as I read them” step. Cutting down is the last step in the process, since we will have so much information after we’re done organizing.

RESEARCH CHALLENGE: Why are adults able to fight of polio, but children cannot? And is there something that can be done other than a vaccination (maybe genetically) to stop polio from affecting children?

Sample Opening:

We will not be able to completely eradicate polio in our lifetimes. Some complications include the cost of polio, and personal and religious beliefs. A shot to the arm is effective all of the time, but it is costly and very hard to be used worldwide. Although we have an alternative vaccine that isn’t costly, it doesn’t always work. A  few drops on the tongue is used in most places globally. It works most of the time, but it actually gives children polio every one in three-million vaccinations. We can see why this go against beliefs. People question whether it’s worth it to try to completely get rid of a disease when it would be infecting people who probably wouldn’t be infected otherwise.